Poet Quotes

He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet.

~ Nell Zink

Laughing behind my hand, I followed him out to his motorcycle. “I like to think I’m hot enough that I don’t need to flirt well.” “Do you? Fortunately, I agree. In fact, this time when you walk in front of me and think I’m checking out your ass, it’ll be true.” “Cooper, you have such a way with words. A real poet.” “Don’t I know it,” he said, sliding on his bike.

~ Bijou Hunter

If you know something to be trueSay it onceThose who can, will receive itOnly the foolish believe they can justify a truth to a court of foolsHonor the truthFor even before a just judgeA lie can be proven to be credibleOn the other handTruth will never require a woman or man's justificationIt can stand aloneWhether torn and ridiculedTruth standsEven after all has been stripped away

~ Gregory C. Warner

And she tried the high heels but she couldn't bring herself to prance.

~ Ani Difranco

A poetess is a collection of unfinished thoughts. She is a tormented phantom, a harbinger of life and death. Those who peer deep inside her catacombs will learn that even madness is a virtue.

~ Nichole Mcelhaney

My highest aspiration in life is to serve as the Limerick Laureate of Nantucket.

~ Alan C. Baird

People worship god.I worship this separation from you.It is worth Haj to a hundred Meccas,This separation from you.People say I am as brilliant as the sun,They say I am famous.What a fire it has lit in me,This separation from you.Behind me is my shadow,Ahead, is my darkness.I fear that it might leave me,This separation from you.No taint of the body is in it,Nor litter of the mind,All has been winnowed out,By this separation from you.When sorrow comes, bringing with itLoneliness and pain,I pull it close to me,This separation from you.Sometimes it colors my wordsSometimes it weaves through my songs,It has taught me great deal,This separation from you.When sorrow, defeated, fell at my feet,Amazed at my fidelity,The world came out to seeThis separation from you.Love earned me fame.People flocked to praise me.It wept in my embrace,This separation from you.The world turned out to tell me,That I had been unwise.It sat me on a throne todayThis separation from you.

~ Shiv Kumar Batalvi

He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.

~ Thomas Hardy

I have loved enough women to know how to paint.If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet.

~ Sarah Ruhl

If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not because it’s a dull world, that’s because you’re not poet enough to wake its soul up.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Question not, but live and labourTill yon goal be won,Helping every feeble neighbour,Seeking help from none;Life is mostly froth and bubble,Two things stand like stone,Kindness in another's trouble,Courage in your own.

~ Adam Lindsay Gordon

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Despair is a night without lights. Dreams are the sunrise that leads you out of the darkness.

~ Jason E. Hodges

Sometimes it is good to breach the rulesso as to achieve an end,Yet keep an edge and not break or bend.

~ Mira Midha

Standing is symbolic of life itself,Open space is just a distance between you and someone else

~ Mira Midha

Whose starboard eyeSaw chariot 'swing low'?

~ James Weldon Johnson

The so-called poet with his vague dreams and ideals is indeed no better than a harmless lunatic; the true poet is the worker, who grips life's throat and wrings out its secret, who selects austerely and composes concisely, whose work is as true and clean as razor-steel, albeit its sweep is vaster and swifter than the sun's!

~ Aleister Crowley

I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain.

~ Willa Cather

Every poet — every storyteller — requires motivation.

~ Andrew Pyper

Only when you see the flower for what it is, you can see it's true beauty

~ Julius P Lundberg

When the hatred stops will the love begin? When there is no more greed will there then be peace?

~ Sherman Kennon

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.

~ Mark Forsyth

...the Moon, the enemy of poets...(Merchant's Two Sons)

~ Giambattista Basile

For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet

~ Plato

A Poet = A willingness to be vulnerable & to trust the inner voice.

~ Morgan Dragonwillow

Writing is also an art.

~ Marc Mullo

I like my writing career and it's progression, I'd rather be that slow moving tide that turns a mountain into a beautiful beach for all to enjoy, rather than a flash in a pan that yields no heat.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Irish improves a poet.

~ Sina Queyras

Legend has it that while drinking wine in a boat on the river, [8th century Chinese poet Li Po] tried to grab the moon's reflection on the surface and tumbled in, which is probably the poet's equivalent of dying bravely in battle.

~ Matthew White

...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing'...Page 100.

~ Jack Kerouac

And while he compared all these things which he was seeing with his eyes to the mental pictures he had painted of them in his homesickness, it became clear to him that he was, after all, destined to be a poet, and he saw that in poets' dreams reside a beauty and enchantment that one seeks in vain in the things of the real world.

~ Hermann Hesse

I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

The ground will never complain how much weight you add on it, how much you dig it and how much you grow on it, How long you live on it. Unused ground is an abomination to nature.

~ Yando Wanii Nimbo

Today is half of Yesterday and Tomorrow, Choose Today to make Tomorrow

~ Yando Wanii Nimbo

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

~ Gary Snyder

At one time I was weary of verse writing, and wanted to give it up. At another time I was determined to be a poet until I could establish a proud name over others. The alternatives battled in my mind and made my life restless.

~ Bashō Matsuo

To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know.

~ William S. Burroughs

We choose exile as a vantage point, from exile we look back on the rejected

~ James Wright

What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author's point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontology outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent authority, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us - assuming they do not become openly irksome. The thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.

~ Peter Sloterdijk